This is funny because I was the operations assistant (office secretary) at the time we received this letter, and I remember it because of the distinct postage.
I met a web developer working for the FSF at a Boston pub one night while in town for a Red Hat conference. After many drinks, he walked us down fifth street to the FSF office building. I wasn’t sure what to expect but when we got there, he typed in some numbers on the door entry system, and what came out was RMS singing the free software song lol. It was a wonderful treat for a young Linux nerd on a hazy adventure in the early morning
I love that your story could be read in two different ways: (1) a recording of RMS appeared on the door entry system screen, or (2) the man himself waltzed out of that door and started singing.
How wonderful! Since the game of the day seems to be the technicalities of the minutiae, could you explain the decision to send the GPLv3 vs GPLv2? Is this a request that happens often?
At least he got a response. Meaning the address didn't change mostly.
A few years back I worked on an embedded linux project. For our first "alpha" release one of the testers read through the license agreement (as opposed to scrolling past all that legalese like most people do) and found the address to write to to get all the GPL source, he then send a letter to the address and it was returned to sender, invalid address. Somehow the lawyers found out about this and the forced us to do a full recall, sending techs to each machine to install an update (the testers installed the original software and were expected to apply updates, but we still had to send someone to install this update and track that everyone got it). Lawyers want to show good faith in courts - they consider it inevitable that someone will violate the GPL and are hoping that by showing good faith attempts to follow the letter and spirit the court won't force releasing our code when a "rouge employee" manages to violate the license.
The more important take away is if your automated test process doesn't send letters to your GPL compliance address to verify it works then you need manual testers: not only are you not testing everything, but you didn't even think of everything so you need the assurance of humans looking for something "funny".
An updated version would say to make sure every email address you use/show in the application/terms/policies are usable and someone receives it.
When reviewing stuff that introduces new emails and whatnot I always spend 10-20 seconds sending an email with "Please respond if you see this" to verify it actually works and someone receives it, as I've experienced more than once that no one actually setup the email before deploying the changes that will show the email to users.
> court won't force releasing our code when a "rouge employee" manages to violate the license.
Is this an actual, real risk? Has a court ever forced anyone to release their code because they were violating the GPL?
My understanding is that this is not how this works. If you violate the license you simply don't have a valid one and basically committing copyright infringement. The punishment for that isn't being forced to comply with the license, it's having to pay damages to the copyright owner.
Showing good faith doesn't really change the end result: you're using code that you don't have a license to. The only fix is to start complying or stop selling your software until you remove the code you don't have a license to use.
Not that I'm aware of. NEXT however did release objective-C source code, but AFAIK that never went to court (anyone able to find those details - I can't find them now).
The text of the GPL is release source code. There are a few people who want release source code to be the only way out of any infringement. If a company intentionally violates the GPL that starts to look like a reasonable argument to courts. However if a company takes "enough" effort to not infringe and does anyway a smaller penalty would apply.
If you don't have a license and distributed software, then that is a copyright violation and the author is entitled to damages. Exactly what those are is something the court figures out. However one important piece of evidence is the license was release your source code. Thus lawyers want that additional cover of we knew and decided not to use GPL code, and there are the steps we took to ensure we didn't: since we took effort you shouldn't apply that extreme penalty.
I do know that good faith in other areas has made a difference. Companies have been caught bribing foreign officials before - which is a shut down the company level event (many countries have laws that if you bribe a government anywhere, not just in their country). However because the company could show they made good faith efforts to ensure everyone knew not to bribe this was just the act of a rouge employee.
How real is it? Hard to say. Good lawyers will tell you that putting in some effort to ensure you don't infringe is cheap protection even if the risk is low.
reminds me of this old joke. Two testers walk into a bar, the first says "i'll have a beer please" and they get their beer as expected. The second says "I just want water" and they get the water just like the asked. Then a user walks into the bar and asks "where's the bathroom?". The bar explodes.
Why should the test process be sending physical letters (edit: in 2025)? Nothing in the GPLv2 requires a physical letter.
The address the OP sent a letter too has already been removed from the canonical version of the license (and was itself an unversioned change from the original address), and section 3 doesn't require a physical offer if the machine-readable source code is provided.
Some companies still do this mainly to make the GPL request process more annoying so fewer people do it. If you have to mail a letter with a check to cover shipping/handling and wait for the company to send you a CD-R with the code on it, fewer people will look at the code compared to if the company just put it on Github or something.
Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author. Granted I don't send them very often but I wouldn't think much of it if I had to. But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason to send a letter (or, it seems, write an address by hand).
Slightly alternate take: this post (and the fact that FSF still replies to paper mail) is about accessibility
Which changes as times change.
In the 90s, requiring access to the internet and an email address would have been exclusionary and decreased access.
Now, 30 years later, it's reversed and physical mail is difficult.
But from another perspective... the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.
In the sense that the FSF wants to be the exact opposite of {install this vendor's parking app to pay for parking} + {get an email account with this particular provider to ensure your email goes through} + {install TicketMaster for access to venue} + {this site requires IE^H^HChrome} all the other mandatory third-party choices we're forced into.
Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design. And continuing to support the most accessible method of communication is laudable!
> the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.
This is a good starting point, but if you have no barriers then you get abuse problems which is why email is terrible. I remember being horrified in the 90s about attempts to charge 1 cent per email. Now I long for a world where that actually happened.
> Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design
I think it's important to note that this isn't actually true. For a lot of homeless people or people who move often postal mail isn't as good. Online communication is actually more universal. Most (all?) public libraries have computers now.
A common mistake in accessibility is to assume accessibility is mostly for users who are blind. I've rarely seen the opposite approach, calling something accessible that is very much not accessible to a person who is blind. A url is much more accessible for many people with disabilities than the postal mail.
Even if you mean access instead of accessibility, presumably a person who can find a way to acquire stamps can just as easily make it to a library with public computers.
It's like the classic argument about IRC vs Discord. IRC is more convoluted to use, the clients are subpar, you need to set up a BNC to receive messages when offline, but Discord requires you to give up your phone number.
Some people find IRC less accessible, but I find having a phone number that I'm willing to give to a third party is a much more difficult requirement.
Physical mail isn't difficult, even now, for anyone with a modicum of competence. I can understand if someone hasn't used physical mail before, but it's very easy to look up how to send a letter + buy envelopes and stamps. If someone cannot do that without difficulty, they really need to work on their basic life skills.
I disagree. It requires taking time out of business hours, and they don't pay you your salary while you line up multiple times for 30 minutes each. I've sometimes had to line up for 2 hours total (4 times) just to mail one thing. Once to ask "how do i mail this", once to ask for a pen (couldn't cut the line because a Karen wouldn't let me), once because I filled the wrong form, etc. Typical USPS experience
Agreed. I am a millennial, so most likely older than the author.
Not having envelopes at the ready is one thing, but ordering stamps... on eBay??? And then wasting a few envelopes because writing down the address is unusual? That kind of blew my mind.
I am a software engineer, and I always have a paper notebook and a pen next to my keyboard to write down stuff.
OP was ordering US stamps to include _in_ the letter, on an SAE (self-addressed envelope) they were sending _from_ the UK, so that the FSF could reply (from the US) using said stamps.
As a millennial myself, I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country, so that they recipient wouldn't incur the cost of replying to me.
I don't find looking on eBay particularly strange, though I'd do a quick search for alternatives first.
The author in the UK so it's pretty much a given that they're exaggerating for comedic effect, but... living in the UK myself, I have only sent maybe about 5 letters in my life, all to the government bureaucracy, and none more recently than a decade ago. And I'm a millennial, albeit on the younger side (so I tell myself).
I don't have any pens, paper or a printer in my house, so I'd probably go to my workplace if I needed to send a letter nowadays. I do occasionally send a parcel though, which involves printing off a shipping label, so the process isn't completely alien.
I'm also a millennial software engineer but I usually write stuff down to text files. I do use pen and paper to draw things if that helps my understanding of them. Like when there's geometry involved.
Sending letters isn't an alien concept to me either. I'm old enough to have done it regularly as a kid. I especially liked the part where you have to write the zip code in those machine-readable digits.
Nah, I'm young and even to me the author's just on the extreme side of "digital native". The first thing I saw in the article was this and knew it was fake, too: "Considering the storage constraints back then" (he's just repeating it, he doesn't know if it's actually applicable). And now you know why random blogs, while insightful, shouldn't be treated as gold truth.
> Not sure if it's being exaggerated for comedic purposes but it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author.
It was pretty recognizable as trolling--the very good and clever "old school Internet" style of trolling where it sounds plausible and sincere, but then you get done reading it and say, "Oh lawd, he got me! Good one!" The kind of writing that people used to spend a lot of time perfecting on Slashdot. I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned. It was very earnestly written though, bravo!
> I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned.
Well, believe it. I'm in my 40s and haven't written a letter since I was a kid. Why would I ever have to? Ask someone who was born in 2003 if they've ever written and mailed a letter. 99% are going to say no.
Once I had to send an international RMA that they wouldn't pay for the shipping. It went something like this:
0. Went to Fedex to check on the shipping cost for this tiny box. It was $120 so I passed
1. Went to USPS, found that they were closed, the only option was a 30 minute line to use the machine. Lined up for 30 minutes, found that it the goddamn UI on the machine did not support international shipments.
2. Went home to generate a USPS international shipping label. $25, much more acceptable. FedEx should be out of business.
3. I didn't have a 2D printer at home, tried to 3D print the shipping label with 1 layer of white and 1 layer of black but it wasn't high resolution enough in the X/Y direction for the label to be readable so I gave up
4. Went to FedEx to use their 2D printers but realized I forgot my USB drive at home
5. Went home to get my USB drive
6. Back to FedEx, realized I forgot my mask (this was COVID times, so no go)
7. Went home to get my mask
8. Back to FedEx, printed the 2D shipping label
9. Back to USPS, found out they had no tape
10. Back to FedEx to buy a roll of tape because I don't know where the hell else to buy tape same day, and all my tape at home are electrical tape, teflon tape, or Gorilla tape
11. Back to USPS and the stupid package drop box had a mechanical issue preventing it from opening more than a few cm, not enough to fit my package
> I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned.
> But I guess younger people and particularly those in tech may genuinely never need a reason
I don't think it's just a age/generation thing though. I'm one year older than my wife, but I grew up in Sweden in the 90s, she grew up in Peru. Somehow, sending/receiving letters was something I've done multiple times growing up, but she never did, and wasn't until we were living together in Spain in the 2010s that she for the first time in her life sent a letter via the street mailboxes. She's not in tech either, if that matters, while I am.
Probably because in our countries (I'm also from S.America) the reliability of the post office is questionable at best, so it wasn't something I ever really used.
I'm not an American and I did write letters in my country of origin as a kid, but one thing that annoys me about US-style envelopes to this day is that they have no lines for address - you're just expected to line text up on your own correctly. If you're used to writing on lined paper because that's the standard in your country (including envelopes!), it can be frustrating.
I wrote a letter to a friend last year. It was the first time in probably well over a decade I had used a pen for more than just scribbled notes or doodling. I made a ton of mistakes and I wasted at least a dozen sheets of paper rewriting it. Seems it's one of those skills that deteriorates without frequent practice, at least for me.
Yeah that's crazy. I use pens to doodle designs or write little recipes or Kanban cards or index cards for what's inside a box... The author maybe does all that by typewriter?
Sending physical mail is one thing. I no longer consider myself "digital native" after reading this:
> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time
I grew up pre-smartphone (pre-Web, partially, even) and even through college probably half my total output for school was hand written (friggin' blue book exams, LOL)
Some time last year, when trying to write something by hand and finding it alien and awkward, it occurred to me that for probably something like 15 years, and maybe more, I've perhaps not written more than a hundred words (signatures aside) by hand per year.
I have kids, so nearly all those words are on the stupid forms they constantly make you re-fill-out from scratch for no apparent reason at doctor's offices. If not for that, it'd be even lower. Some years I bet I was under 50. I go months without writing more than two or three words, total.
Even digital natives are using pens with their smartphones and tablets these days. It's just a choice now whether you use them. Though, not sure whether kids these days are still learning it in school.
Disappointed that International Reply Coupons are no longer a thing too! I used one back in the 1980s to write to the authors of the Power C compiler[1] in the US about a bug (yes, a bug report by mail). I enclosed an IRC in case they wanted to reply. They were kind enough to write back, and didn't use the IRC (but sent it back). They did however include a floppy disk with the fixed compiler, which was nice of them.
I still use them for ham radio QSL cards. They work everywhere that is a member of the Universal Postal Union (nearly all are). You can buy them online from Swiss Post. They will mail them for free.
I have a roll of Forever stamps, purchased years ago. I don't even remember why, specifically, I purchased them. In theory, I could post a letter on my deathbed (I'm Generation X, so it's not that far off) and be assured that the delivery fee is covered by the cost of one stamp. Unfortunately, most of the people I would wish to correspond with will also be deceased at that time. So …
I leave it to y'all to monkey-knife-fight for the rest of the roll.
Keeping a pad of paper at your computer is one of those underrated things. You'd think the computer can record information just like the paper, and it can, but psychology is weird.
Sending mail being a challenging or difficult thing does come across as odd to me, being in Canada and born in the late 90s. Sure I haven't mailed a letter in a couple years, but when I do the main hassle is just finding where I put my stamps. I can however understand that finding return postage would be a hassle; I'm not sure why the UK and Canada (amongst others) don't do IRCs anymore.
It's also much easier these days to find out how to correctly format an address for a given destination. (At least for alphabet-based languages; I recently tried to decipher a Korean address in a business park and got nowhere fast.)
I don't send letters by post but I often need to send packages by post. Perhaps it's returning some merchandise where the merchant didn't have free shipping. Perhaps it's shipping a security key to a close friend so I can have offsite backup of a key. When I moved, I got rid of my book collection by asking friends which books they wanted and I shipped it to them (media mail is cheap).
It's efficient to transmit information over the internet, but it's still essential to send physical items by post. When I visit USPS branches, I always see plenty of people mailing packages.
Sending international postage in my country (South Africa) is not a very reliable process, so couriers and email are used quite heavily here instead. Its not necessarily an age thing.
> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time.
Sometimes I cut out my address from a bill and tape that on as my return address. I know it’s formatted right.
I’d definitely do the same on a “self”-addressed stamped envelope that I need returned.
As far as I know there are still some things you have to post in the UK, like sending your cut up old driver's licence to the DVLA and maybe you still have to post your V5 when you sell a car. OP might not own a car or drive, though, so who knows?
You still have to send back your cut up old driver's license, though I have my doubts that someone is sat there checking and cross referencing each one they receive.
Honestly, sending letters is increasingly alien: I rarely send one letter per year. This year I have sent two, only because I am trying to contact an incredibly old-fashioned directorate of the German government that doesn't seem to have an email address.
The stamps I have, I bought years ago - by now, they don't cover current letter prices. I wind up putting too much postage on the letters, because I'm not going to go buy even more stamps that I probably won't need...
> it is interesting to me how alien the act of sending a letter by post is to the author.
Indeed.
The author also seems unaware that a 1991 document could not contain a Web address because the world wide web did not exist yet. They guess it is because it is not widely available. That astonished me.
I mean, yes it reads a little awkward, but not too long ago I had misplaced the stack of envelopes + stamps I keep in my desk drawer and I needed to send something by snail mail (hey, remember that term?) and yeah. I am not someone who takes notes on paper, so I'm holding a pen only about once a week (the years quoted in the article sounds weird even to me) and it was a bit of a task (the whole sending, this time, not the writing). Bonus points for trying to use up old stamps when they're constantly changing the needed amount every couple years - so I usually need to put about 3 stamps even for local postage. But I guess that's just because I'm cheap and don't want to buy "new" code stamps when I have about 20 EUR in old stamps I can still use up.
Always interesting discussions with my wife who works in an office where paper mail, fax machines, and signing things on paper all happen multiple times every single day.
Man. I am generation-X, from a time when teachers would take the kids to a local post office and teach them how to send a letter and a telegram.
And yet, while I have a vague idea of how could I send a letter nowadays, I would have absolutely no idea of how to send postage for the international return.
This thread is more interesting to me than the article itself. I am the complete opposite. I always have a pen in my pocket along with a really small (2"x3") notebook, and I absolutely use it all the time.
Personally, I find pen and a memo pad much handier than a phone. There is no unlocking, searching, or loading. And I can write much faster than tap a little screen keyboard. Even more importantly, on my memo pad there are no notifications to completely sidetrack my lizard brain.
But aside from the practical, it is also just such a nice change of pace to use analog technologies when I can. I use my computer and write software all day. It's good to get a break sometimes.
I'm at the point where the only things I handwrite are gift labels and holiday cards. Maybe an occasional doctor's office form, but those are increasingly digital.
I recently was in an awkward situation when ordering my new passport. Most times I got to sign some papers I have some signature which is a few waves, not forming many letters. In the passport office the clerk told me they can't recognize any enough letters in there, so I had to do multiple attempts till they were happy ... now my passport got a signature I won't be able to replicate ever.
(I do some handwriting for notes taking, but that's some writing based on block letters, not script as in a signature)
>now my passport got a signature I won't be able to replicate ever
I'm not sure I could ever prove I am who I say I am using my signature. My wife signs my name most of the time when it's necessary for a check or a health form for the kids or whatever. Whenever I go to vote, I try to sneak a look at their copy of the form to see how I signed it when I registered. I think my credit union has one 'on file' for me, but I'm sure it's nothing like how I actually sign my name and is from ~25 years ago.
This is a very strange requirement, to be honest. E.g. what about foreigners whose native script is not the same, so their (pre-existing) signature is unparseable to that clerk anyway?
FWIW I have a signature that is barely recognizable as my two initials, and I have never had it rejected on such grounds in the five different countries (using two different scripts) I've had to sign documents using it.
Genuinely curious, I don't write anything long by hand, but do you not jot down disposable information with frequency, or date food, or anything like that? I date food we put in the fridge/freezer. I jot down something like a phone number if I am redirected. I have to give my pet medication occasionally and I use a post-it to track so the household can know. Like I said, I'm not writing anything even as long as a card, but I use a pen multiple times a week, and essentially daily. I know a lot of people use their phones for this stuff (and I do too), and maybe I'm an old person now for not using my phone for all of that.
What date are you putting on the food? Every packaging here in Spain (and Europe I assume) has both the production date and "best before" dates printed on them from the factory, and stuff that doesn't have packaging you know if they're bad by looking/smelling/tasting.
Think the last time I used a pen is about 8-9 years ago when I had to sign something to buy my home. Notes and stuff I just write on my phone or computer and I don't see what else I'd use a pen for.
I tried for a while to do the whole "notebook life" thing that was really trendy to blog about some years back, but found I never had the notebook I wanted on-hand (even if I was just using one notebook...) or forgot to grab a pen or can't find a pen et c. Then making it possible to find anything in them requires more effort afterward.
What do I have on me basically all the time? My phone.
I've done everything in Apple Notes for years now, and it's so much less hassle, and actually works for me. I just make sure to include words I might use to search for a note, when writing a new note. Search does the rest. I can and sometimes do organize things into directories, but usually it's kinda wasted effort. Search is enough.
Meanwhile, the few dozen pages scattered across four or five notebooks that I generated in that brief kick remain, passively, a pain in the ass. I've carted them through two moves, meaning to digitize them, because when I remember they exist and browse I'm like "oh yeah, that was a good idea!" but, out of sight out of mind and when I stumble across them I'm always in the middle of doing other, more important shit.
Wow, I use a pen nearly every day. Sometimes I deliberately get a pen or pencil and paper rather than a phone. I was doing some home improvements in my attic, and I would often need to jot down a measurement so I could cut wood etc. I did this once or twice on my phone and realized it's much easier to do this with a pencil and small notepad.
In what is perhaps the most ironic blend of high and low tech, I wrote my own software to build grocery lists, which I then print and use a pen to cross items off as I shop. This is by far the most efficient vs trying to faff about with some mobile solution.
I probably write a check every 5 years, and each time I need to ask someone how to do it, because the checks are slightly different compared to the country I grew up in.
My hand writing got rusty and awkward until I read that writing something by hand is shown to strengthen one's memory and recollection. It definitely seems to be the case for me and has made me much more organised.
Now I journal on a paper notebook, take daily notes on a whiteboard and I'm rediscovering index cards for long term storage, but I wish real life had a search function.
If I had an automated scanning + OCR + convert to Org system, I would never use a text editor for notes ever again.
Try using a tablet with hand written notes. There are programs (or even applications that replace the popup keyboard ) that will convert your writing into computer text.
I think that gives the improved retention plus easy filing of the result and if your writing is like mine the ability to actually read what you wrote a year before.
I'm not sure if I go one day without writing something.
For my blog, I can usually go straight to typing, but for my bigger projects I start by writing out any ideas, research, etc. I find that writing stuff helps me recall it later, even if I don't actually read the notes. It's especially helpful for big blobs of interconnected ideas.
He's also obviously not used to write/type letters... The whole thing is quite awful.
Schools used to teach this a minimum but they no longer do. It was also standard to learn that for job hunting but, again, I don't think many people apply for jobs by post nowadays although it can still be useful to know how to write a formal cover letter.
>but I'm sure I hand-write something at least once a month..
I'm sure I do too, but I couldn't actually tell you what I used it for. Probably to cross items off a shopping list or sign my name on something. Actually we got a new car and I needed to sign the form at the DMV to get license plates, so I guess that was it.
That reminds me on the time the FSF moved, they changed their address, and the open source product I worked on had to change their address in the license notices in our product:
This was written in 2022. Do people still know how to postal-mail things? Asking as the acquisition of envelope, paper and stamps read like a new adventure for the author.
I make a practice of sending (picture) postcards to each of my descendants, when i arrive at a new place. It is a very rare occasion when I can find them, even rarer for the vendor to know what they are. Once the vendor was insisting that a flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) was indeed a postcard. Sadly, I often have to buy them at the airport on arrival.
It seems to be a cultural thing. As an European I am used to find postcards in every town, but when I went to Singapore I had a hard time procuring them. None of the souvenir shops had them, and when I asked the employees they often looked at me as if I were some kind of strange animal. I finally found a small, dusty selection in the darkest corner of a huge department store.
> flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes)
These are called “index cards” in the US, although you can certainly use them to make flash cards if you want. Source: Am old enough to have used index cards unironically.
Funny how the later generations of IT people often have poor penmanship.
I'm old enough to remember penmanship in school, but I was into computers from a young age so my penmanship ended up just as bad as author.
I did improve it a lot by getting a penpal through reddit. We communicated for a year and change, and during this time I went through the process of learning to be patient and write my letters slowly so they were legible.
It hurt my hand a lot to write a whole letter and I felt like I had said about as much as I have in this comment, but with time I became faster and faster.
Now probably 10 years later I still take a greater care when I write, ensuring each letter is legible.
It's kinda charming when some old-school address or phone number, that perhaps few have used in a long time, still works.
Circa 2010, I bought a vintage Concept2 Model B rowing machine, made in the 1980s, and wanted to fix it up. The paper order form I found for parts was similar to those tiny order forms at the bottom of an ad in an old comic book, where you'd handwrite your return address, and it told you the address to mail it to, with your payment.
Somehow, not only did this address still reach them, but they were set up to fulfill parts orders this way, they actually had the parts for this decades-old model, and sent me the parts (for a pittance), and they tossed in a free service manual.
I already loved the product (from using it at gyms), and now I loved the company.
I wonder what percentage of 25 year-old URLs still work.
Readit News
A few years back I worked on an embedded linux project. For our first "alpha" release one of the testers read through the license agreement (as opposed to scrolling past all that legalese like most people do) and found the address to write to to get all the GPL source, he then send a letter to the address and it was returned to sender, invalid address. Somehow the lawyers found out about this and the forced us to do a full recall, sending techs to each machine to install an update (the testers installed the original software and were expected to apply updates, but we still had to send someone to install this update and track that everyone got it). Lawyers want to show good faith in courts - they consider it inevitable that someone will violate the GPL and are hoping that by showing good faith attempts to follow the letter and spirit the court won't force releasing our code when a "rouge employee" manages to violate the license.
The more important take away is if your automated test process doesn't send letters to your GPL compliance address to verify it works then you need manual testers: not only are you not testing everything, but you didn't even think of everything so you need the assurance of humans looking for something "funny".
If this test was reproduced today, we may see different results ;)
[1]: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/fsf-office-closing-party
[2]: https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/mailing
> Standard mail forwarding lasts 12 months. You can pay to extend mail forwarding for 6, 12, or 18 more months (18 months is the maximum).
Edit for source: https://www.usps.com/manage/forward.htm
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43783632
When reviewing stuff that introduces new emails and whatnot I always spend 10-20 seconds sending an email with "Please respond if you see this" to verify it actually works and someone receives it, as I've experienced more than once that no one actually setup the email before deploying the changes that will show the email to users.
Is this an actual, real risk? Has a court ever forced anyone to release their code because they were violating the GPL?
My understanding is that this is not how this works. If you violate the license you simply don't have a valid one and basically committing copyright infringement. The punishment for that isn't being forced to comply with the license, it's having to pay damages to the copyright owner.
Showing good faith doesn't really change the end result: you're using code that you don't have a license to. The only fix is to start complying or stop selling your software until you remove the code you don't have a license to use.
The text of the GPL is release source code. There are a few people who want release source code to be the only way out of any infringement. If a company intentionally violates the GPL that starts to look like a reasonable argument to courts. However if a company takes "enough" effort to not infringe and does anyway a smaller penalty would apply.
If you don't have a license and distributed software, then that is a copyright violation and the author is entitled to damages. Exactly what those are is something the court figures out. However one important piece of evidence is the license was release your source code. Thus lawyers want that additional cover of we knew and decided not to use GPL code, and there are the steps we took to ensure we didn't: since we took effort you shouldn't apply that extreme penalty.
I do know that good faith in other areas has made a difference. Companies have been caught bribing foreign officials before - which is a shut down the company level event (many countries have laws that if you bribe a government anywhere, not just in their country). However because the company could show they made good faith efforts to ensure everyone knew not to bribe this was just the act of a rouge employee.
How real is it? Hard to say. Good lawyers will tell you that putting in some effort to ensure you don't infringe is cheap protection even if the risk is low.
The address the OP sent a letter too has already been removed from the canonical version of the license (and was itself an unversioned change from the original address), and section 3 doesn't require a physical offer if the machine-readable source code is provided.
Which changes as times change.
In the 90s, requiring access to the internet and an email address would have been exclusionary and decreased access.
Now, 30 years later, it's reversed and physical mail is difficult.
But from another perspective... the goal should be to ensure that anyone who wants to do a thing can, with as few third party requirements as possible.
In the sense that the FSF wants to be the exact opposite of {install this vendor's parking app to pay for parking} + {get an email account with this particular provider to ensure your email goes through} + {install TicketMaster for access to venue} + {this site requires IE^H^HChrome} all the other mandatory third-party choices we're forced into.
Postal mail, for all its faults, is universally accessible by design. And continuing to support the most accessible method of communication is laudable!
Accessibility and convenience >> convenience
This is a good starting point, but if you have no barriers then you get abuse problems which is why email is terrible. I remember being horrified in the 90s about attempts to charge 1 cent per email. Now I long for a world where that actually happened.
I think it's important to note that this isn't actually true. For a lot of homeless people or people who move often postal mail isn't as good. Online communication is actually more universal. Most (all?) public libraries have computers now.
Even if you mean access instead of accessibility, presumably a person who can find a way to acquire stamps can just as easily make it to a library with public computers.
Some people find IRC less accessible, but I find having a phone number that I'm willing to give to a third party is a much more difficult requirement.
I disagree. It requires taking time out of business hours, and they don't pay you your salary while you line up multiple times for 30 minutes each. I've sometimes had to line up for 2 hours total (4 times) just to mail one thing. Once to ask "how do i mail this", once to ask for a pen (couldn't cut the line because a Karen wouldn't let me), once because I filled the wrong form, etc. Typical USPS experience
Not having envelopes at the ready is one thing, but ordering stamps... on eBay??? And then wasting a few envelopes because writing down the address is unusual? That kind of blew my mind.
I am a software engineer, and I always have a paper notebook and a pen next to my keyboard to write down stuff.
I guess this all tells me I'm getting old :-).
OP was ordering US stamps to include _in_ the letter, on an SAE (self-addressed envelope) they were sending _from_ the UK, so that the FSF could reply (from the US) using said stamps.
As a millennial myself, I have no idea where else I'd look for <recipient country> stamps should I want to include them on a SAE I was sending to said country, so that they recipient wouldn't incur the cost of replying to me.
I don't find looking on eBay particularly strange, though I'd do a quick search for alternatives first.
I don't have any pens, paper or a printer in my house, so I'd probably go to my workplace if I needed to send a letter nowadays. I do occasionally send a parcel though, which involves printing off a shipping label, so the process isn't completely alien.
Sending letters isn't an alien concept to me either. I'm old enough to have done it regularly as a kid. I especially liked the part where you have to write the zip code in those machine-readable digits.
Some people really have terrible hand writing. And dyslexia is a thing, too.
It was pretty recognizable as trolling--the very good and clever "old school Internet" style of trolling where it sounds plausible and sincere, but then you get done reading it and say, "Oh lawd, he got me! Good one!" The kind of writing that people used to spend a lot of time perfecting on Slashdot. I refuse to believe there are adults out there where things like using a pen to write and mailing a letter are alien concepts that need to be learned. It was very earnestly written though, bravo!
Well, believe it. I'm in my 40s and haven't written a letter since I was a kid. Why would I ever have to? Ask someone who was born in 2003 if they've ever written and mailed a letter. 99% are going to say no.
0. Went to Fedex to check on the shipping cost for this tiny box. It was $120 so I passed
1. Went to USPS, found that they were closed, the only option was a 30 minute line to use the machine. Lined up for 30 minutes, found that it the goddamn UI on the machine did not support international shipments.
2. Went home to generate a USPS international shipping label. $25, much more acceptable. FedEx should be out of business.
3. I didn't have a 2D printer at home, tried to 3D print the shipping label with 1 layer of white and 1 layer of black but it wasn't high resolution enough in the X/Y direction for the label to be readable so I gave up
4. Went to FedEx to use their 2D printers but realized I forgot my USB drive at home
5. Went home to get my USB drive
6. Back to FedEx, realized I forgot my mask (this was COVID times, so no go)
7. Went home to get my mask
8. Back to FedEx, printed the 2D shipping label
9. Back to USPS, found out they had no tape
10. Back to FedEx to buy a roll of tape because I don't know where the hell else to buy tape same day, and all my tape at home are electrical tape, teflon tape, or Gorilla tape
11. Back to USPS and the stupid package drop box had a mechanical issue preventing it from opening more than a few cm, not enough to fit my package
12. Went to another USPS to drop the package
Some adults were born in 2007
I don't think it's just a age/generation thing though. I'm one year older than my wife, but I grew up in Sweden in the 90s, she grew up in Peru. Somehow, sending/receiving letters was something I've done multiple times growing up, but she never did, and wasn't until we were living together in Spain in the 2010s that she for the first time in her life sent a letter via the street mailboxes. She's not in tech either, if that matters, while I am.
The envelopes I'm used to look like this: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%B2%D0%B5...
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> Writing the address on the envelope was awkward, as I haven’t used a pen in several years; it took a few attempts and some wasted envelopes, printing the address would have taken less time
Some time last year, when trying to write something by hand and finding it alien and awkward, it occurred to me that for probably something like 15 years, and maybe more, I've perhaps not written more than a hundred words (signatures aside) by hand per year.
I have kids, so nearly all those words are on the stupid forms they constantly make you re-fill-out from scratch for no apparent reason at doctor's offices. If not for that, it'd be even lower. Some years I bet I was under 50. I go months without writing more than two or three words, total.
[1] Still around: http://mixsoftware.com/product/powerc.htm
https://shop.post.ch/en/packing-sending/sending-letters/regi...
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I leave it to y'all to monkey-knife-fight for the rest of the roll.
It's also much easier these days to find out how to correctly format an address for a given destination. (At least for alphabet-based languages; I recently tried to decipher a Korean address in a business park and got nowhere fast.)
It's efficient to transmit information over the internet, but it's still essential to send physical items by post. When I visit USPS branches, I always see plenty of people mailing packages.
Sometimes I cut out my address from a bill and tape that on as my return address. I know it’s formatted right.
I’d definitely do the same on a “self”-addressed stamped envelope that I need returned.
You still have to send back your cut up old driver's license, though I have my doubts that someone is sat there checking and cross referencing each one they receive.
The stamps I have, I bought years ago - by now, they don't cover current letter prices. I wind up putting too much postage on the letters, because I'm not going to go buy even more stamps that I probably won't need...
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Indeed.
The author also seems unaware that a 1991 document could not contain a Web address because the world wide web did not exist yet. They guess it is because it is not widely available. That astonished me.
Always interesting discussions with my wife who works in an office where paper mail, fax machines, and signing things on paper all happen multiple times every single day.
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Wow -- I mean, sure, I don't use a pen that often, but I'm sure I hand-write something at least once a month...
Personally, I find pen and a memo pad much handier than a phone. There is no unlocking, searching, or loading. And I can write much faster than tap a little screen keyboard. Even more importantly, on my memo pad there are no notifications to completely sidetrack my lizard brain.
But aside from the practical, it is also just such a nice change of pace to use analog technologies when I can. I use my computer and write software all day. It's good to get a break sometimes.
(I do some handwriting for notes taking, but that's some writing based on block letters, not script as in a signature)
I'm not sure I could ever prove I am who I say I am using my signature. My wife signs my name most of the time when it's necessary for a check or a health form for the kids or whatever. Whenever I go to vote, I try to sneak a look at their copy of the form to see how I signed it when I registered. I think my credit union has one 'on file' for me, but I'm sure it's nothing like how I actually sign my name and is from ~25 years ago.
FWIW I have a signature that is barely recognizable as my two initials, and I have never had it rejected on such grounds in the five different countries (using two different scripts) I've had to sign documents using it.
I don't have roommates, but if I did we'd probably use a whiteboard for tracking errands and schedules.
What date are you putting on the food? Every packaging here in Spain (and Europe I assume) has both the production date and "best before" dates printed on them from the factory, and stuff that doesn't have packaging you know if they're bad by looking/smelling/tasting.
What do I have on me basically all the time? My phone.
I've done everything in Apple Notes for years now, and it's so much less hassle, and actually works for me. I just make sure to include words I might use to search for a note, when writing a new note. Search does the rest. I can and sometimes do organize things into directories, but usually it's kinda wasted effort. Search is enough.
Meanwhile, the few dozen pages scattered across four or five notebooks that I generated in that brief kick remain, passively, a pain in the ass. I've carted them through two moves, meaning to digitize them, because when I remember they exist and browse I'm like "oh yeah, that was a good idea!" but, out of sight out of mind and when I stumble across them I'm always in the middle of doing other, more important shit.
In what is perhaps the most ironic blend of high and low tech, I wrote my own software to build grocery lists, which I then print and use a pen to cross items off as I shop. This is by far the most efficient vs trying to faff about with some mobile solution.
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I'm in the US so I use permanent marker to write my lawyers phone number on my arm before protests
Now I journal on a paper notebook, take daily notes on a whiteboard and I'm rediscovering index cards for long term storage, but I wish real life had a search function.
If I had an automated scanning + OCR + convert to Org system, I would never use a text editor for notes ever again.
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I think that gives the improved retention plus easy filing of the result and if your writing is like mine the ability to actually read what you wrote a year before.
For my blog, I can usually go straight to typing, but for my bigger projects I start by writing out any ideas, research, etc. I find that writing stuff helps me recall it later, even if I don't actually read the notes. It's especially helpful for big blobs of interconnected ideas.
Schools used to teach this a minimum but they no longer do. It was also standard to learn that for job hunting but, again, I don't think many people apply for jobs by post nowadays although it can still be useful to know how to write a formal cover letter.
I'm sure I do too, but I couldn't actually tell you what I used it for. Probably to cross items off a shopping list or sign my name on something. Actually we got a new car and I needed to sign the form at the DMV to get license plates, so I guess that was it.
https://github.com/moritz/otrs/commit/e845575e1848fd0124fb8d...
And of course, as happens more often, this issue was raised to us by Debian developers, who care a great deal about 'correctness'
Free Software Foundation 31 Milk Street, # 960789 Boston, MA 02196 USA
https://www.fsf.org/about/contact/mailing
Many GNU projects use a rule that will fail 'make distcheck' when it sees an address in the sources [2].
[1] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=bf31... [2] https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/gnulib.git/commit/?id=086c...
I make a practice of sending (picture) postcards to each of my descendants, when i arrive at a new place. It is a very rare occasion when I can find them, even rarer for the vendor to know what they are. Once the vendor was insisting that a flash card (smallish, lined cards for taking notes) was indeed a postcard. Sadly, I often have to buy them at the airport on arrival.
Occasionally actually post them before I leave a place (ideally soon after I arrive).
Generally they arrive substantially after I get back.
These are called “index cards” in the US, although you can certainly use them to make flash cards if you want. Source: Am old enough to have used index cards unironically.
I'm probably younger than you by quite a bit.. no descendents, no time to travel, not allowed in many countries or US states anyway
https://www.postcrossing.com/
I can pretty much guarantee it'd be an adventure for my teen, nearly adult, children.
I'm old enough to remember penmanship in school, but I was into computers from a young age so my penmanship ended up just as bad as author.
I did improve it a lot by getting a penpal through reddit. We communicated for a year and change, and during this time I went through the process of learning to be patient and write my letters slowly so they were legible.
It hurt my hand a lot to write a whole letter and I felt like I had said about as much as I have in this comment, but with time I became faster and faster.
Now probably 10 years later I still take a greater care when I write, ensuring each letter is legible.
Circa 2010, I bought a vintage Concept2 Model B rowing machine, made in the 1980s, and wanted to fix it up. The paper order form I found for parts was similar to those tiny order forms at the bottom of an ad in an old comic book, where you'd handwrite your return address, and it told you the address to mail it to, with your payment.
Somehow, not only did this address still reach them, but they were set up to fulfill parts orders this way, they actually had the parts for this decades-old model, and sent me the parts (for a pittance), and they tossed in a free service manual.
I already loved the product (from using it at gyms), and now I loved the company.
I wonder what percentage of 25 year-old URLs still work.